> does this actually save me time at all?

Soooooo....

As one who hasn't taken the plunge yet -- I'm basically retired, but have a couple of projects I might want to use AI for -- "time" is not always fungible with, or a good proxy for, either "effort" or "motivation"

> How much money have I wasted in tokens?

This, of course, may be a legitimate concern.

> If it generates the slop version in a week but it takes me 3 more weeks to clean it up, could I have I just done it right the first time myself in 4 weeks instead?

This likewise may be a legitimate concern, but sometimes the motivation for cleaning up a basically working piece of code is easier to find that the motivation for staring at a blank screen and trying to write that first function.

Well for me, the amount of time/effort as a function my of my motivation has acted as a natural gatekeeper to bad ideas. Just because I can do something with AI now doesn’t necessarily mean that I should. I am also weary of trading time and effort for outright money right out of my own pocket to find out, especially when I find the people I’d be giving money to so reprehensible. I don’t live somewhere where developers make a lot of money. I’m not poor in any stretch but not rich enough that I can waste money on slop for funsies. But I can spend a month on validating a side project because I find coding as a hobby enjoyable in and of itself, and I don’t care if I throw out a few thousand lines of code after a little while and realize I’m wasting my time.

Cleaning up agent slop code by hand is also a miserable experience and makes me hate my job. I do it already because at $DAYJOB because my boss thinks “investing” in third worlders for pennies on the dollar and just giving them a Claude subscription will be better than investing in technical excellence and leadership. The ROI on this strategy is questionable at best, at least at my current job. Code Review by humans is still the bottleneck and delivering proper working features has not accelerated because they require much more iteration because of slop.

Would much rather spend the time making my own artisanal tradslop instead if it’s gonna take me the same amount of time anyway - at least it’s more enjoyable.